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The sensitivity (S) of cloud parameters to the influence of different aerosol and meteorological parameters has in most previous aerosol–cloud interaction (aci) studies been addressed using traditional statistical methods. In the current study, relationships between cloud droplet effective radius (CER) and aerosol optical depth (AOD, used as a proxy for cloud condensation nuclei, CCN), i.e., the sensitivity (S) of CER to AOD, are investigated with different constraints of AOD and cloud liquid water path (LWP). In addition to traditional statistical methods, the geographical detector method (GDM) is applied in this study to quantify the relative importance of the effects of aerosol and meteorological parameters, as well as their interaction, on S. Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) C6 L3 data and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA-5 reanalysis data, for the period from 2008 to 2022, were used to investigate aci over eastern China. Two contrasting areas were selected: the heavily polluted Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and a relatively clean area over the East China Sea (ECS). Linear regression analysis shows that CER decreases with the increase in AOD (negative S) in the moderately polluted atmosphere (0.10.3) over the YRD. Evaluation of S as function of the LWP shows that in the moderately polluted atmosphere over the ECS, S is negative in the LWP interval [40 gm-2 , 200 gm-2 ], and the sensitivity of CER to AOD is substantially stronger as LWP is larger. In contrast, in the polluted atmosphere over the YRD, S is positive in the LWP interval [0 gm-2 , 120 gm-2 ] and does not change notably as function of LWP in this interval. The study further shows that over the ECS, the CER is larger for higher low tropospheric stability (LTS) and relative humidity (RH) but lower for higher pressure vertical velocity (PVV). Over the YRD, there is no significant influence of LTS on the relationship between CER and AOD. The GDM has been used as an independent method to analyze the sensitivity of cloud parameters to AOD and meteorological parameters (RH, LTS and PVV). The GDM has also been used to analyze the effects of interactions between two parameters and thus obtain information on confounding meteorological effects on the aci. Over the ECS, cloud parameters are sensitive to almost all parameters considered except for cloud top pressure (CTP), and the sensitivity to AOD is larger than that to any of the meteorological factors. Among the meteorological factors, the cloud parameters are most sensitive to PVV and least sensitive to RH. Over the YRD, the explanatory power of the sensitivity of cloud parameters to AOD and meteorological parameters is much smaller than over the ECS, except for RH, which has a statistically significant influence on CTP and can explain 74 % of the variation of CTP. The results from the GDM analysis show that cloud parameters are more sensitive to the combination of aerosol and a meteorological parameter than to each parameter alone, but confounding effects due to co-variation of both parameters cannot be excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alpine grassland ecosystem accounts for 53 % of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) area and is an important ecological protection barrier, but it is fragile and vulnerable to climate change. Therefore, continuous monitoring of grassland aboveground biomass (AGB) is necessary. Although many studies have mapped the spatial distribution of AGB for the QTP, the results vary widely due to the limited ground samples and mismatches with satellite pixel scales. This paper proposed a new algorithm using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a bridge to estimate the grassland AGB on the QTP from 2000 to 2019. The innovations were as follows: (1) in terms of ground data acquisition, spatial-scale matching among the traditional ground samples, UAV photos, and MODIS pixels was considered. A total of 906 pairs between field-harvested AGB and UAV sub-photos and 2602 sets of MODIS pixel-scale UAV data (over 37 000 UAV photos) were collected during 2015–2019. Therefore, the ground validation samples were sufficient and scale-matched. (2) In terms of model construction, the traditional quadrat scale (0.25 m 2) was successfully upscaled to the MODIS pixel scale (62 500 m 2) based on the random forest and stepwise upscaling methods. Compared with previous studies, the scale matching of independent and dependent variables was achieved, effectively reducing the impact of spatial-scale mismatch. The results showed that the correlation between the AGB values estimated by UAV and MODIS vegetation indices was higher than that between field-measured AGB and MODIS vegetation indices at the MODIS pixel scale. The multi-year validation results showed that the constructed MODIS pixel-scale AGB estimation model had good robustness, with an average R2 of 0.83 and RMSE of 34.13 g m -2. Our dataset provides an important input parameter for a comprehensive understanding of the role of the QTP under global climate change. The dataset is available from the National Tibetan Plateau/Third Pole Environment Data Center (10.11888/Terre.tpdc.272587; H. Zhang et al., 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management and conservation of lakes should be conducted in the context of catchment because lakes collect water and materials from their upstream catchments. So the datasets of catchment-level characteristics are essential for limnology studies. Lakes are widely spread on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) with a total lake area exceeding 50 000 km2, accounting for more than half of the total lake area in China. However, there has been no dataset of lake-catchment characteristics in this region to date. This study constructed the first dataset of lake-catchment characteristics for 1525 lakes with area from 0.2 to 4503 km2 on the TP. Considering that large lakes block the transport of materials from upstream to downstream, lake catchments are delineated in two ways: the full catchment, which refers to the full upstream contributing area of each lake, and the inter-lake catchments which are obtained by excluding the contributing areas of upstream lakes larger than 0.2 km2 from the full catchment. There are six categories (i.e. lake body, topographic, climatic, land cover/use, soil & geology, and anthropogenic activity) and a total of 721 attributes in the dataset. Besides multi-year average attributes, the daily time series of climatic variables are also extracted, which can be used to drive lumped hydrological models or machine learning models for hydrological simulation. The LCC-TP dataset contains fundamental information for analysing the impact of catchment-level characteristics on lake properties, which on the one hand can deepen our understanding on the drivers of lake environment change, and on the other hand, can be used to predict the water and sediment properties in unsampled lakes based on limited samples. This provides exciting opportunities for lake studies in a spatially-explicit context and promotes the development of landscape limnology on the TP. The dataset of lake-catchment characteristics for the Tibetan Plateau (LCC-TP v1.0) is accessible at the National Tibetan Plateau/Third Pole Environment Data Center https://doi.org/10.11888/Terre.tpdc.272026, Liu, 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water clarity serves as a sensitive tool for understanding the spatial pattern and historical trend in lakes' trophic status. Despite the wide availability of remotely sensed data, this metric has not been fully explored for long-term environmental monitoring. To this end, we utilized Landsat top-of-atmosphere reflectance products within Google Earth Engine in the period 1984–2018 to retrieve the average Secchi disk depth (SDD) for each lake in each year. Three SDD datasets were used for model calibration and validation from different field campaigns mainly conducted during 2004–2018. The red / blue band ratio algorithm was applied to map SDD for lakes (>0.01 km 2) based on the first SDD dataset, where R2=0.79 and relative RMSE (rRMSE) =61.9 %. The other two datasets were used to validate the temporal transferability of the SDD estimation model, which confirmed the stable performance of the model. The spatiotemporal dynamics of SDD were analyzed at the five lake regions and individual lake scales, and the average, changing trend, lake number and area, and spatial distribution of lake SDDs across China were presented. In 2018, we found the number of lakes with SDD <2 m accounted for the largest proportion (80.93 %) of the total lakes, but the total areas of lakes with SDD of <0.5 and >4 m were the largest, both accounting for about 24.00 % of the total lakes. During 1984–2018, lakes in the Tibetan–Qinghai Plateau region (TQR) had the clearest water with an average value of 3.32±0.38 m, while that in the northeastern region (NLR) exhibited the lowest SDD (mean 0.60±0.09 m). Among the 10 814 lakes with SDD results for more than 10 years, 55.42 % and 3.49 % of lakes experienced significant increasing and decreasing trends, respectively. At the five lake regions, except for the Inner Mongolia–Xinjiang region (MXR), more than half of the total lakes in every other region exhibited significant increasing trends. In the eastern region (ELR), NLR and Yungui Plateau region (YGR), almost more than 50 % of the lakes that displayed increase or decrease in SDD were mainly distributed in the area range of 0.01–1 km 2 , whereas those in the TQR and MXR were primarily concentrated in large lakes (>10 km 2). Spatially, lakes located in the plateau regions generally exhibited higher SDD than those situated in the flat plain regions. The dataset is freely available at the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (10.11888/Hydro.tpdc.271571, Tao et al., 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water clarity provides a sensitive tool to examine spatial pattern and historical trend in lakes trophic status. Yet, this metric has insufficiently been explored despite the availability of remotely-sensed data. We used three Secchi disk depth (SDD) datasets for model calibration and validation from different field campaigns mainly conducted during 2004-2018. The red/blue band ratio algorithm was applied to map SDD for lakes (> 1 ha) based on the first SDD dataset, where R2 = 0.79, RMSE = 100.3 cm, rRMSE = 61.9 %, MAE = 57.7 cm. The other two datasets were used to validate the SDD estimation model, which were indicated the model had a stable performance of temporal transferability. The annual mean SDD of lakes were retrieved across China using Landsat top of air reflectance products in GEE from 1984 to 2018. The spatiotemporal dynamics of SDD were analysed at the five lake regions and individual lake scales, and the average, changing trend, lake number and area, and spatial distribution of lake SDDs across China were presented. In 2018, we found that the lakes with SDDs < 2 m accounted for the largest proportion (80.93 %) of the total lakes, but the total area of lakes with SDD between 0-0.5 m and > 4 m were the largest, accounting for 48.28 % of the total lakes. During 1984-2018, lakes in the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau lake region (TQR) had the clearest water with an average value of 3.32 ± 0.38 m, while that in the Northeastern lake region (NLR) exhibited the lowest SDD (mean: 0.60 ± 0.09 m). Among the 10,814 lakes with SDD results more than 10 years, 55.42 % and 3.49 % of lakes experienced significant increasing and decreasing trends, respectively. At the five lake regions, except for the Inner Mongolia-Xinjiang lake region (MXR), more than half of the total lakes in every other lake region exhibited significant increasing trends. In the Eastern lake region (ELR), NLR and Yungui Plateau lake region (YGR), almost more than 50 % of the lakes that displayed an increase or decrease in SDD were mainly distributed in an area of 0.01-1 km2, whereas that in the TQR and MXR were primarily concentrated in large lakes (> 10 km2). Spatially, lakes located in the plateau regions generally exhibited higher SDD than those situated in the flat plain regions. The dataset can now be accessed through the website of the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (http://data.tpdc.ac.cn): DOI: 10.11888/Hydro.tpdc.271571. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]